(Please click on the images to see them enlarged) First part of the series: Listening For Pyrene’s Echo 1: City By The Lake Second part of the series: Listening For Pyrene’s Echo 2: A City In Pink The tour bus zoomed up to the grassy verge of the mountain road and deposited me and a(…)

At the urging of Beth, from The Cassandra Pages, I am reposting a post I put up Facebook earlier today. It came to me while I was walking to the train station near my house: I’ve been trying to figure it out, why it is the “hiking” concerned with making miles and reaching summits has(…)

I’ve been deeply involved with ultralight backpacking for fifteen years now, starting with the first explorations with Ray Jardin’s “The Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook”, through the heydey of Backpacking Light, making my own gear, getting to know some of the more well-known UL leaders like Glen Van Peski and Japan’s Tomoyoshi Tsuchiya and Hideaki(…)

In 1998 my dear friend Sally and her boyfriend Jim came to visit me and my wife Yumi here in Japan. Initially we were supposed to walk the South Japan Alps, but due to a huge landslide that took out the road going up there, and time constraints at my job, we had to cut(…)

(Please click on the images to see them at their full size.) Laughing Knees is 10 years old today! What started out as a way to express my rage and anguish at the Iraq War and Bush, gradually lost it’s fever and mutated into something much closer to my heart. It’s been a long, long(…)

Please Go Here for the beginning of the story. The four of them gathered behind the trellis and watched the street below. In the rain the street looked dark and lonely, and even the street light on the corner didn’t provide enough light to illuminate more than the small portion of the other side of(…)